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- by Phil Windley, Board Member
PDEC in the News
Year End Reflections and Projections
I have been doing a lot of reflecting on what has unfolded this past year (See part 2 for below more complete details) and also thinking keystone strategy for the coming year.
Personal Data Ecosystem Strategy for the coming year….
- PDEC opening a 2012 “class” of startups and establishing a more regularized process for welcoming new ones. I would like to have 3-4 existing startups proactively involved in this process if you would like to be a part of this please let me know.
- Launching the Personal Data Frontier publication to meet the needs of larger enterprises seeking to understand the key emerging technologies and business opportunities. I am keen to introduce you all to our editor Kelly and will be doing so in the coming week.
- Offering a range of day long workshop for larger enterprises on User-centric Identity and Personal Data covering key ideas, open standards etc. The range is from 101 introductions and basics to a masterclass mini MBA in identity and personal data.
- Growing relationships with the larger enterprises in the space.
- Bringing a qualified community manager on board to help with both the Startup Circle and the Enterprise class of membership.
- Revamping the website and improving our information sharing as a community.
- Aligning membership structure with the growing industry.
- Developing a governance model that retains the values and allows for large and small companies to participate and get key industry collaborative work done including development of industry norms and standards if called for.
Opportunities in the Coming Year…
- A 2nd WEF report on Personal Data has a targeted release date for March 2012
- SXSW is happening.
- Refinement of accountability and “trust” frameworks for this industry.
- Developing a relationship with Doc Searl’s Customer Commons organization.
Issued for transformation in the coming year….
- Bootstraping new organizations into being is a challenge particularly with limited resources. Our capacity must increase so that no one person is a bottle neck.
- Larger companies are seeking more information about the opportunities in personal data and we need to respond.
- Having a better site. We inadvertently picked a wordpress website template that was particularly challenging to design without costing 1000’s of dollars we didn’t have.
PART2 – Looking Back
Reflecting on the seeds….
The seeds of PDEC started almost 2 years ago with conversations initiated by Mydex with Drummond that then got connected to conversations with Phil Windley and his technology, Mike Schwartz’s Gluu, Azigo and their long term efforts. Key conversations about privacy, trust and the opportunity around data happened at the STL-convened Privacy 2.0 conference.
In April 2009 following the Kynetx Impact Conference I lead the convening of first face to face meeting of what was then going to be called PDX (personal data exchange) met. It startups (Paul Trevithick, Phil Windley and his Kynetx team, Joe Johnston, Drummond Reed), lawyers (Scott Blackmer, Rene Lloyd), Thinkers (Kaliya Hamlin, Marc Davis) and a large enterprise thinking about how a new ecosystem would and could work.
Since that time a lot has happened….
- Natalie Fonseca has convened together two Privacy Identity and Innovation conferences.
- WEF published its report on personal data as an emerging asset class along with convening meetings continuing to move the ball forward
- The White House published NSTIC The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, hosted two workshops invited PDEC to speak about the companies that are bringing forward market solutions to the problem.
- WSJ has published an extensive series What They Know.
- There have been three Internet Identity Workshops where personal data and the new emerging landscape have had their own special day.
- Legal innovations have started to emerge and the ABA is having meetings about key identity and data definitions.
The Personal Data Ecosystem became formalized…
- Kaliya worked with Drummond originally in the founding of what was to be PDX before he chose to become involved with one startup in July.
- Kaliya Hamlin and Phil Windley both wrote key principles for the ecosystem within a week of each other in August 2010.
- With the encouragement of Marc Davis, Kaliya Hamlin continued to pursue founding PDEC taking the $20,000 she received from her fathers estate following his passing at the end of August 2010 to launch the website in time for STL’s October 2010 event a week before IIW 11.
- PDEC chartered as an Identity Commons working group to gain access to community resources and get started working before being a totally incorporated.
- We explored the possibilities for large companies to join the consortium but the market timing was too early and the value proposition/exchange was not strong enough.
- Mary Hodder volunteered to help with the development of the organization and we successfully responded to the Federal Trade Commission and Commerce Department Notice of Inquiries. We also contributed to several W3C efforts touching in this space including DoNotTrack, and ID in the Browser and attended the TPAC.
- Clay Shirky joined the board of PDEC at SXSW joining Phil Windley, Aldo Castanda, Mary Hodder and Tony Fish.
- Kaliya worked to develop the vision and outline of the startup Circle and get the first class of members to join. We announced that program concurrent with the WEF meeting about personal data in Vienna in June.
- The occupy movement emerged and the control of personal data was actually named as one of the issues the movement was drawn around.
- Customer Commons grew out of the VRM list/movement and is creating the space for citizens/customers and Mary Hodder choose to transition out of serving on the board of PDEC to give her attention to this new organization.
Personal Data Frontier – Launching in January
PDEC is please to announce the launch of its premier publication The .
It is the essential monthly guide written by and for personal data ecosystem pioneers. Our subscribers are the ground-breaking technologists, product development enterprises, data entrepreneurs, and policymakers who are shaping and leading this rapidly-evolving sector. In each monthly issue, our experienced reporting team and respected guest contributors track, distill, and make sense of the 100+ emerging standards, rapidly growing number of listservs and companies, analyst reports, social media buzz, news, and insider talk.
Stay Apprised of this Emerging Territory
A small group of technology visionaries has toiled in the shadows for years to illuminate and shape an important, emergent market niche: The personal data ecosystem. As disastrous privacy breaches become the norm, there’s growing pressure from many quarters to shift the locus of control over personal data from institutions to individuals. This profound change — like the revolutions initiated by automobiles, television, personal computers, and the web — promises to transform every aspect of our day-to-day lives, including how we buy and vote, how our children navigate in cyberspace, and how business and governments across the globe engage with people and their data.
Get Access to the Most Credible Resource Available Without Overload
Published by PDEC, the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, Personal Data Frontier is the comprehensive source for information in the emerging personal data services space, offering in-depth analysis and news no other publication does, or can. The Frontier provides invaluable leverage to those in the vanguard of developing and delivering solutions and services in the personal data ecosystem. The Internet Society (ISOC) is funding PDEC’s research on the industry practices and trends the Frontier will regularly examine and interpret. Each monthly issue boosts your sector intelligence with insightful, broad-based, and knowledgeable reporting. We do the legwork so you can focus on making the most profitable use of what we reveal in your sphere.
Subscribe Now and Keep Your Edge
Board Changes at PDEC
Mary Hodder announced her resignation from the board to shift her attention to . We are grateful for her service to the organization and wish her all the best in her future endeavors.
Resigning my Post as Chairman at PDEC
Effective immediately I’m resigning from the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium’s board after nearly 14 months as Chairman.
As many of you might have seen, we accomplished a lot in the last twelve months, written up in our Part I, II and III end of year summary newsletters (at our blog here, here and here).
In this first year of PDEC, we published papers, spoke at events and contributed to various endeavors in the personal data discussions happening on the web and in person around the world.
I’m personally very committed to a world where individuals drive their own data and I’m very proud of the work we did at PDEC, which is focused on companies and how those companies can build for a personal data ecosystem.
In the past couple of months, I’ve also worked to create a new org: , with about eight other folks, where the org is for Individuals only, no companies may join. Customer Commons looks at markets and data from a strictly individual point of view. I believe that it’s a conflict of interest to work on both organizations (which represent either individuals or companies). Therefore, I want to see Customer Commons get up and running, and I realize I can’t remain at PDEC, which represents the company perspective on the personal data ecosystem.
So for the foreseeable future, I’ll be working on the same personal data issues, but from this Individual perspective, at Customer Commons. I wish Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium all the best.
~ Mary Hodder
2011 Year in Review (Part 3 of 3)
PDEC Recent News and Specific Topics
This is Part III, a review of PDEC news and specific issues in our work. PDEC folks and companies are highlighted in bold.
Scroll below for news on these topics:
- Forrester Research Report covers Personal Identity Management
- Startup Circle News
- Startup Circle Company News
- World Economic Forum update
Forrester Research Report covers Personal Identity Management
The Forrester Report releases a report on Personal Identity Management. PDEC was among 14 organizations/companies interviewed for the report including other startup circle members: Azigo, Singly/the locker Project, Personal. Read the report , or from Personal’s website.
Join us at the IIW-Satellite in DC, January 17th, 2012
The Internet Identity Workshop is heading to Washington, DC to do a one day Satellite event.The theme is Lerveraging Open Identity and Personal Data.
It is being hosted at the National Institute of Health (on the Red Metro Line).
You can get a 15% discount with the code “PersonalData”.
It’s Carrier IQ’s World, We Just Live in It
Coverage by Read Write Web’s Marshall Kirkpatrick of the CarrierIQ scandal. Kaliya Hamlin has an extensive quote in the article about how this is an opportunity for the personal data ecosystem because it proves there is value in the data.
TEDx Brussels: Identity in the Contexts of the Future
Kaliya Hamlin was invited to speak at TEXx Brussels on November 22nd, 2011 about at Day Deep in the Future. You can view her talk on their site. Others speaking that day included science fiction writer David Brin, founder of the Arduino Project David Cuartielles, Leila Janah founder of Sama Source and Elleen Bartholomew from the X-Prize Foundation.
2011 Year in Review (Part 2)
Part 2: The Second Half
Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium had a busy 12 months. Here we are at the end of the year, and we wanted to catch you up. This is Part 2, a recap of the second half of 2011. PDEC people and Startup Circle companies are in bold.
PDEC Events, Publications and Speaking Activities: Through November 2011
Who Stewards the Personal Data Question? Org Chart
Note: This post was originally published at .
Below is a diagram showing the non-profit organizations (note: no for-profits, conferences or governmental orgs were included) that are stewarding pieces of the Personal Data Ecosystem. I wanted to show how the orgs are relating to the problem of how to remake our digital lives, through more user-driven personal data, for more equal transactions throughout our lives with companies, the online world, and our government.
The orgs have been divided into four areas: technical, market, policy and individual advocates. While all the orgs have an interest and are doing some thinking in all the areas, these divisions show the foundational mission of the orgs. If each org, through its foundation mission, succeeded, they would be heros for sure. The problem is, mission creep. This is a problem for startups as well, where companies don’t focus and get their piece right to succeed, but rather think competitively and try to take too many pieces of the market, leading to failure. So too will the large number of problems, plus mission creep, cause any of these orgs to fail at their mission.
Ideally, we’ll see all the orgs working together in inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary ways, relating each of their solutions to the others, but keeping focused and executing their piece of this vast and Byzantine puzzle to solve the Personal Data Ecosystem. In creating this “org chart” I talked with folks like Kevin Marks of Microformats and Activity Streams, Harry Halpin of the Federated Social Web, Scott David, Don Thibeau of OIX and OpenID, Drummond Reed (who has worked with OASIS extensively), Doc Searls of VRM, Craig Burton, Steve Rappetti and Phil Wolff of Data Portability project, Dazza Greenwood of ID Cubed, Judi Clark and Joe Andrieu of Information Sharing Working Group, among others.
So here is a picture of who is doing what in the Personal Data space:
Below is more information on these organizations.
Individual Solutions
— recently formed by Doc and Joyce Searls, Renee Lloyd, Joe Andrieu, Dean Landsman, Markus Sabadello, Judi Clark, Iain Henderson, Craig Burton, and me, as well as a few others in the room that, I apologize, I’m forgetting. mission is: a community of customers, funded only by customers, serving the interests and aspirations of customers.
Market Solutions
— is a trade association for startups and big companies that agree to a set of principles for user-driven personal data. 19 companies (currently) have joined, and PDEC’s mission is to support market solutions to the personal data question. Kaliya Hamlin is Executive Director and I am Chair of the Board.
PDEC also has just formed a Legal Town Hall, a monthly call starting January 11, 2012, to be led by Judi Clark, to talk about what kind of policies are needed when individuals share their data.
— WEF has been working with lots of early thinkers in the Personal Data space for the past 18 months to They put out a report: last February and continue to have monthly calls to prepare for a presentation of the working groups’ efforts at Davos in January.
— Vendor Relationships Management, the brainchild of Doc Searls created during his fellowship at the Berkman Center, is a discussion group with a very active maillist, a movement for user-driven relationships with entities, and a steward of developers coding to bear out the group’s vision.
Policy Solutions
— Don Thibeau is Chair of their Board, and Scott David is their counsel. OIX’s mission is to build trust in the exchange of identity credentials online. They do this through the open, standardization of Trust Frameworks. They don’t make trust frameworks, but rather their mission is to be the home of other’s trust frameworks for the sharing of personal data, login credentials, and other types of private or controlled information. For example, the company Drummond Reed co-founded, Connect.me, Connect.Me, hosts the at OIX, who publishes it for others to point to as a public declaration of the trust framework. And, the was the first open identity trust framework to be listed by OIX
— From the ISWG: The ISWG works with the Kantara Initiative, Identity Commons, Project VRM, the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, and Customer Commons. Run by co-chairs, Joe Andrieu and Iain Henderson and secretary Judi Clark, ISWG’s formal mission is “to identify and document the use cases and scenarios that illustrate the various sub-sets of user driven information, the benefits therein, and specify the policy and technology enablers that should be put in place to enable this information to flow.”
The Information Sharing Work Group helps individuals take control of the information we share online. The Standard Information Sharing Agreement is a contract for the use of your information, agreed to BEFORE you share it. It has two parts. A basic agreement covers all the default terms, things like “don’t redistribute my information without my permission”, which all recipients agree to. Then, for each individual instance of sharing, a data transaction agreement with just the bare essentials: who gets what data for what purpose. By moving all the complicated legalese into the basic agreement, we’ve dramatically simplified each specific transaction agreement.
Now, when you want to know what’s happening with your data, it’s presented simply and concisely in easy-to-understand terms… while the basic agreement defines how recipients must treat your data appropriately. The Sharing Agreement is designed to make it easy to understand and make informed decisions about sharing information online.
(ID3) — a newly formed research and developement group affiliated with MIT and led by John Clippinger, Executive Director and CEO, (who started the Law Lab at Berkman/Harvard a couple of years ago and the Social Physics project a couple of years before that, also at Berkman) and Henrik Sandell, COO and CTO of ID3. ID3′s mission is to “oversee the development of a multi-disciplinary center founded to research the role of law in facilitating cooperation and entrepreneurial innovation.” Their major focus based upon the website seems to be Trust Framework development. Dazza Greenwood is also involved, as is Mike Schwartz of Gluu is doing some technical work for them.
Technical Solutions
— “Aims to consult, design, educate and advocate interoperable data portability to users, developers and vendors.” They don’t make standards but they help steward them to support more data portability, including protocols like OpenID, OAuth, RSS, Microformats and RDF among others. Steve Repetti is their Chair and Phil Wolff is very active as a public speaker for them. Here is some .
— has recently become a working group of W3C, and is stewarded by many including Evan Prodromou and Harry Halpin. FSW is stewarding work on federated social web software and protocols, including things like PubSubHubBub, OpenID, Activity Streams, OAuth, among many protocols.
— developed a protocol for how user’s share personal data, using both JSON and Atom based streams of metadata. Monica Wilkinson and Kevin Marks actively steward the project. Activity Streams works on the Microformats model, proposing standards around activities already heaving in used online.
— Microformats have been created for many pieces of data shared, such as hcard or hcalendar. Stewards of this project include Tantek Celik and Kevin Marks.
— Created protocol for a federated login with OpenID 2.0 spec. OpenID Foundation is currently working with Microsoft, Google and Facebook on OpenID Connect, as well as on , an open standard for web sign-in ease switching between multiple accounts on a website. OpenID Foundation’s chair is Don Thibeau.
— from their website: “…promotes greater understanding and adoption of standards-based identity and trusted infrastructure technologies, policies, and practices. The group provides a neutral setting where government agencies, companies, research institutes, and individuals work together to advance the use of trusted infrastructures, including the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).”
— responsible for the XRI / XDI standard, currently for pointing to data and creating link contracts. From their website: “XDI.ORG is an international non-profit public trust organization governing open public XRI and XDI infrastructure. XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier) and XDI (XRI Data Interchange) are open standards for digital identity addressing and trusted data sharing developed at OASIS, the leading XML e-business standards body. XRI and XDI infrastructure enables individuals and organizations to establish persistent, privacy-protected Internet identities and form long-term, trusted peer-to-peer data sharing relationships.” Drummond Reed co-chaired the group with well, Gabe Wachob, of the XRI TC at OASIS and Andy Dale, Markus Sabadello, Mike Schwartz we involved in developing the standard.
— Umbrella standards body stewarding a number of standards for personal data use and control including the Do Not Track proposal. The Federated Social Web, and all their combined efforts including Activity Streams, recently landed at W3C.
(International Telecommunications Unit) — making infocommunications standards since 1865. Yes.. that’s really 1865.
(UMA), a Kantara working group — develops specs to allow individuals to “control the authorization of data sharing and service access made between online services on the individual’s behalf, and to facilitate interoperable implementations of the specs.” UMA group chair is Eve Maler.
— From their website: “The Direct Project specifies a simple, secure, scalable, standards-based way for participants to send authenticated, encrypted health information directly to known, trusted recipients over the Internet.”
(Internet Engineering Task Force) — Working on a number of standards around identity and data portability.
— is working on development of standards-based, interoperable, verified claims agent implementations. Is at IDCommons and was originally proposed by Paul Trevithick, though many people are part of the group.
— is “independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies” and uses an open source model similar to the Apache Foundation. Their leadership includes Tantek Celik, Chris Messina & David Recordon.
Update: I’ve added the following item to technical:
— a non-profit based in Brussels that provides messaging standards around banking wires, is proposing a new infrastructure layer called the “Digital Asset Grid.” The DAG would provide the metadata for all data transactions (including personal data), not just money wires, as well as a hardened, full duplex transaction layer for security, flexible identity and certified data. (Full disclosure, I’m on the team that proposed the Digital Asset Grid to SWIFT).
If you have more information about these groups, people involved, or corrections, please leave them in the comments and I’ll update the post. Thanks!